For fifty years, Duke Ellington was America’s most important and innovative musical figure, achieving distinction as a composer, arranger, songwriter, bandleader and pianist, and writing and producing timeless music of every kind.

The so-called Night of the Broken Glass, which the Hitler government represented as a spontaneous irruption of anger, was a cynical and carefully choreographed attack on Germany’s Jewish population with the aim of demoralising them and despoiling them of their possessions.

Whatever about questions of mandate or democratic legitimacy, the bravery of the insurgents who fought in 1916, and of those who were executed for their role as leaders of the Rising, is beyond dispute.

Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, is best seen not as a renegade liberal but as a sympathiser with a very different movement, which sought to break the grip of Thomism and return to the early sources of the Church.